Hot Topics:

Fort Morgan Breaking News, Sports, Weather, Traffic

Keeping track of electrons

City's agreement with MEAN allows for less expensive compliance with federal energy rules

By Jenni Grubbs

Times Staff Writer

Posted:
05/11/2016 12:19:00 AM MDT

On the Web

Watch Fort Morgan City Council meeting videos: Visit https://streaming.cityoffortmorgan.com/ This link connects to a link to the live stream of the city's public access cable channel, as well as links to videos of previous council meetings. The video of a Tuesday night meeting is typically uploaded the next day.

Frequently, the things done by the Fort Morgan City Council wind up preventing negative impacts on city residents, making them seem less newsworthy.

But those things also can be among the more important decisions the council makes for people's pocketbooks and quality of life.

One example of that is an agreement passed at the May 3 council meeting that likely prevented increased costs for electric customers and the possibility of future uncertainty about where the city would get its power.

The council approved an agreement with the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska about network integration transmission services, or NITS, that allows MEAN to stay ahead of changes to federal energy regulations and the city to avoid costly expenditures on scheduling power transmission and filing Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, reports, according to City Manager Jeff Wells and Water Resources/Utilities Director Brent Nation.

Advertisement

Fort Morgan currently gets a chunk of the power it provides to city residents and businesses from Western Area Power Administration, aka Western, and another portion of the electricity from MEAN. Fort Morgan has had its NITS agreement with Western, but MEAN now is required to file reports about the city's flow of electricity, leading to the energy loads getting double-reported, according to Wells.

Under the new rules, MEAN is "required to show where every electron of electricity is shipped and how it's shipped there on their transmission systems and their transmission agreements," Wells said. "City of Fort Morgan owns and has its own transmission agreement with Western Area Power Administration and in essence, we use that capacity to get that electricity from MEAN to us. However, MEAN doesn't have any control over that so what is showing is double capacity for shipping electricity to city of Fort Morgan."

The plan for the city to get out of the NITS agreement with Western and enter into one with MEAN has been in the works for a long time, but what made things a bit sticky was finding a way to ensure that it would not mean the city being able to get power from Western also was not dependent upon Fort Morgan being a MEAN member.

"It's a process that we've been working on for a year, year-and-a-half or more," City Attorney Jason Meyers said.

But the final agreement the council passed May 3 will allow the city to ensure it will be able to regain from MEAN the rights to portion of power supply from Western if the city were no longer part of MEAN.

"One of the things that we did, as directed by council, in these negotiations was make sure that in the event that for whatever reason we are no longer a member of MEAN, whatever capacity is held on the NITS agreement that MEAN has with Western would then be available for us to go and get a new NITS agreement with Western to ensure that we would have that transmission capacity for the future," Wells explained.

And not taking this action could have been quite expensive for Fort Morgan, according to both Wells and Nation.

"If we didn't cancel ours and kept it, we would be responsible for scheduling our own electricity, which would require us to hire a dispatcher, which would require us to do a whole lot of other things that can be done easily by MEAN," the city manager said. "This keeps MEAN from getting in trouble with FERC when they are audited, and they can show that every electron is going through a contract that they own and that they have."

Nation added that it made sense for the city to allow MEAN to handle the energy scheduling and reporting aspects of the new federal regulations since they already had the expertise and staff able to do it.

"It's much easier, since we're already paying MEAN to do those types of things, to go ahead and allow them do it," Nation said. "And now we have the ability to potentially get this back if we part ways with them in the future. I think it gives us everything that we need."

The net result of all of this should be that Fort Morgan Light & Power customers do not notice any changes.

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.